With the fatality on Skypilot this summer, it’s time this irregular columnist asks the big question:
Would you rather have dense wilderness and considerable effort blocking your passage to the summit of Skypilot – an ascent requiring research, skills and planning – or a gondola ride taking you 900 meters above sea level and a well-marked trail leading you there, with a trail map as your guide?
The question digs into two polar ends of the philosophy on access to wilderness. On one hand you have a small number of recreationalists summiting Skypilot because the journey there consists of long distances, large elevation gain, navigation of an aged network of old logging roads and trails taking you up valley. Then you must pick up the scrambling trail to the top, contend with a small pocket glacier as well as weather issues.
On the other you have a large number of recreationalists, from seasoned mountaineers to ultra runners riding the gondola up and following the brushed out, cleared out, signed and marked roads and trails to the start of the scrambling trail, and then a cairned and flagged route to the top. However, from the well-trained and experienced mountaineer to the stunningly fit trail athlete, accidents occur no matter how well trained and well planned, and I’m not going to single out any one user group as being the cause of these incidents. What I am going to do is take a side: the side of Squamish being a gateway to outdoor recreation.
That huge increase in people heading out to Skypilot has pros and cons. Pros include the staggering amount of trip reports, blog posts and forum threads devoted to peoples’ trips up Skypilot. This makes gathering information about your ascent plentiful and hopefully that leads to better decisions. On the downside, all that info is based on opinion and can be very misleading. People begin to judge whether their ascent will be successful based on others’ performance, and not the objective itself and their personal experience. As numbers rise so does the amount of incidents associated with that particular route. The gondola isn’t at fault, it’s the outdoor recreation capital of Canada, luring people into dangerous, risk taking, immensely rewarding behaviour.
We live in too beautiful a place.
At the heart of the matter lies search and rescue services. The volunteer-based, provincially-funded service has had to deal with the increase in calls – and no one is being paid to show up.
If you’re thinking of heading up to Skypilot tell someone where you’re going, prepare for more distance, fatigue, colder, poorer weather than you expect, research the route and talk to people in the community, get a variety of weather forecasts and above all turn around if you’re getting the “no feeling.” You know, that red flag just before you think about pushing on heroically at all costs.
Once home consider a donation to Squamish Search and Rescue, our own homegrown safety net.
